Eric T. Meyer gave a presentation on engaging with information in the digital age. He discussed how technology is driving research to become more collaborative through tools like digital libraries, journals, and peer collaboration. Research is answering bigger scientific questions that require teamwork. Digital photos have changed the process of whale identification, allowing instant feedback but requiring more complex information systems. The digital environment allows faster answers to questions but researchers have yet to develop new paradigms.

1. Eric T. Meyer Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford I3 Conference: information: interactions and impact 20 June 2011, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK Engaging with Information: Knowledge in the Digital Age

2. Technology and Society

3. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommyc/163772266/

5. Social Informatics 5 Some Social Informatics Ideas: Computerization Movements Social Actors (vs. users) STIN: Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (as research strategy)

6. Browsing and Searching Libraries Journals Peers

7. Complexity Continuum

8. The Growth Of Teams Source: S. Wuchty et al., (2007). The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge. Science 316, 1036 -1039.

9. e-Research is defined as: research using digital tools and data for the distributed and collaborative production of knowledge

10. Source: CERN, CERN-EX-0712023, http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1203203

12. Hanny’sVoorwerp Source: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama), and the Galaxy Zoo Team. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/01/image/a/

13. Weisenburger vs. the Wiki on Pynchon Comparison of book and wiki annotation efforts Source: Schroeder, R., & Besten, M. D. (2008). Literary Sleuths Online: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki. Information, Communication & Society, 11(2), 167 - 187.

14. Why is science and research growing more collaborative? Is technology driving it? Or are there big scientific questions that cannot be answered otherwise?

15. SPLASH: Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance, and Status of Humpbacks Meyer, E.T. (2009). Moving from small science to big science: Social and organizational impediments to large scale data sharing. In Jankowski, N. (Ed.), E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice (Routledge Advances in Research Methods series). New York: Routledge.

16. 16 Photo-identification Humpback whales

17. 17 Switching From Film To Digital Cameras

19. 19 Matching techniques on screen

20. 20 Matching techniques on paper

21. 21 Photo-id process: film External lab film developing Field photos Printing or sleeving Labeling Organizing Shot logs Identification LEGEND Time = relative size of arrow (thick=longer time) In field At lab Analysis External to project

22. 22 Photo-id process: digital Printing (in some cases) Download, backup, initial organizing Labeling and organizing Field photos Data entry Summary logs Identification LEGEND Time = relative size of arrow (thick=longer time) In field At lab Analysis External to project

23. 23 Idiosyncratic systems

24. 24 Organizing digital photos

25. 25 Organizing digital photos

27. Less loss of data

28. More time at end of long days

29. Storage issues

30. More photographs

31. More complex info systems

32. Instant feedback

33. Efficiency

34. Better coverage

36. IT staff

37. Skilled users

38. Less detail

40. Larger catalogs

41. Better healthAt lab Analysis External to project

42. 27 Who does the work? Film Often volunteer labor Field photos Printing or sleeving Labeling Organizing Shot logs Digital Permanent employees Download, backup, initial organizing Labeling and organizing Field photos Data entry Summary logs

43. GAIN: Genetic Association Information Network Ca. 2006-2007

44. Data needed to answer key questions in psychiatric genetics case study

45. http://www.rin.ac.uk/humanities-case-studies Bulger, M., Meyer, E.T., de la Flor, G., Terras, M., Wyatt, S., Jirotka, M., Eccles, K., Madsen, C.

46. The Case Studies

47. Reconfiguring Resources

48. “ Old Bailey Online hasn’t replaced anything for me or displaced anything for me, but it is part of this general transformation of how I do what I do.

49. “ The amount of time I now spend doing the very mechanical, laborious, time-consuming work is much smaller.You can now do things in 5 seconds which it took you 3 months to do a few years ago.

50. Transformations in Use

51. “ It’s a huge change. You can do things much more quickly, read much more widely, find connections…it’s very, very important.

52. “ With something like the Burney Collection, 5 years ago for writing an article I would need to review the newspapers, I would have gone into the British Library and done it on microfilm. 20 years ago, I would have gone into the British Library and done it with the actual paper in front of me.Now I sit at home and I do a keyword search.

53. “ I get pretty much everything I need by way of primary sources now from the web. For primary sources, I’ve now got more material than I will need probably for the rest of my lifetime.

54. Enhanced vision

55. Cambridge polyphonic manuscript, 13th C.Source: The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) Graduale Triplex, 6/7th C. Florence polyphonic manuscript, 13th C. Source: TecaDigitaleRicerca (TECA)

56. Reconstructing the materiality of digital objects binder's knife colours S: That'a just a – it's not a note H: I think it's part of the decoration isn't it? I mean the colours would have been really vivid wouldn't they - blues and greens, yellows S: It's quite deteriorated H: I'm guessing this is a sort of slice in the – through the parchment isn't it? S: Yeah H: It's showing white there S: Goodness only knows how it got there H: These are binding fragments. They've been man-handled into the binding of another book and presumably a binder's knife has sliced through the pages. It's lucky in a way it’s only sliced through the parchment note or decoration?

57. “ Asking new questions?

58. “ I’m not sure all of this raises the quality of anybody’s work.I think it would be quite daft to pretend that all of this makes us better scholars, or makes our books or papers of higher quality. I don’t know if that is true by any means, but it certainly makes it easier and I suppose makes the quantity of stuff that you can produce greater.

59. “ What might take you several months if not years of research, you could do in hours, days, a week. So I think that means that it makes the nature of your research different because it allows you quantitative information much more quickly, which then allows you to maybe think about how you might use that information differently,because you’ve got so much more time.

60. “ My greatest frustration in life is that we can now answer all the questions we had in 1980 faster, much, much faster. And we can get around to publishing them much, much more quickly. But what we haven’t yet done is develop the new questions and the new paradigms that should be possible, and that we as imaginative scholars should be able to imagine.

61. “ It also puts a much higher premium on creative use of the resources. There’s no reason not to be creative. There’s no excuse not to get it just right. And so it’s like how word processing changed the way we write. When you don’t have to physically retype each page, you make a lot more changes, and so there’s no excuse not to have better writing

62. Complexity Continuum

63. Complexity Continuum

64. Complexity Continuum

65. TITLE Information practices in the physical sciences Project partners

66. Digitisation and Impact

68. University of Oxford Podcasts

69. Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online

70. British History Online

72. Siobhan Davies RePlay

73. http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/

74. Web archives Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art http://ssrn.com/abstract=1714997 Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T., Madsen, C., van den Heuvel, C., Thomas, A., Wyatt, S. (2010). London: JISC. Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: Challenges and Opportunities for Investment http://ssrn.com/abstract=1715000 Thomas, A., Meyer, E.T., Dougherty, M., van den Heuvel, C., Madsen, C., Wyatt, S. (2010). London: JISC. Web Archives: The Future(s) http://ssrn.com/abstract=1830025 Meyer, E.T., Thomas, A., Schroeder, R. (2011). London: IIPC.

75. So what?

76. Digital as a dirty word “ I do feel pressure to work more with originals than with the digital images, but for the most part I do feel like I get more out of using these images on my computer. But there’s a certain pressure that that’s not what top scholars do because that’s not what top scholars did 25 years ago

77. Source: Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R. (2009). Untangling the Web of e-Research: Towards a Sociology of Online Knowledge. Journal of Informetrics 3(3):246-260

78. Source: Schroeder, R., Meyer, E.T. (2009). Gauging the Impact of e-Research in the Social Sciences. Paper presented at the 104th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 8-11, San Francisco, California.

79. Eric T. Meyer eric.meyer@oii.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=120 With funding from: